Tag: Working Families Party

January 20, 2017 / Election Law Society / Comments Off on Connecticut and Fair Representation: How Minority Parties Are Guaranteed Representation With “Limited Voting”, And Whether The Practice Burdens The Right To Vote

By Jake Albert

Most elections in our country are winner-take-all. Parties will spend all of their time and money supporting a certain candidate for office, and the candidate that receives more votes wins 100% of the power. That is how our country is run at the federal level: we only have one President, no matter how many votes other candidates receive. But states sometimes employ alternative methods for certain local elections, with Connecticut being one of them.

There is no state quite like New York – and not many election laws quite like New York’s, either. As one example, only New York and six other states permit fusion voting. On a fusion ballot, a candidate can be listed as candidate for more than one party. Fusion voting, as noted the 1997 Supreme Court decision of Timmons v. Twin Cities Area New Party, had its heyday during the Gilded Age. Political parties, rather than governmental entities, distributed their own ballots to voters but did not affirmatively tell voters what other parties endorsed the same candidate(s) they supported. Thus, Candidate Smith could be supported by both the Granger and Republican parties, but those who voted the Granger ballot would not necessarily know from the ballot the Granger party handed them that the Republican Party also supported Smith.

Elections are political. In every election voters choose among candidates who are associated with one party or another, with two major parties dominating the landscape in this country. Choosing a member from one of these parties involves countless hours of campaigning and millions of dollars nationwide, all to advance one’s own, or often one’s party’s, agenda while in office. This can often lead to gridlock when partisan political agendas collide. But what happens when the very people who run the actual elections are also part of this partisan political system?